Microorganisms sustain and drive multifunctionality in natural ecosystems and biological systems. Because of their remarkable diversity and unique bioenergetic and metabolic abilities, microorganisms are relevant and valuable for biotechnological applications (e.g. in the industrial, agricultural, and biomedical sectors). Microorganisms play key roles in many biological processes, which can be exploited to produce valuable compounds and use otherwise ‘inaccessible resources.’ Understanding the regulation of their bioenergetic and metabolic mechanisms, as well as the genetic information stored within the microbial genomes, is therefore crucial for engineering these microorganisms as biocatalysts and developing relevant technologies for the production of biomolecules, biomaterials, (primary and secondary) metabolites, biofuels, and pharmaceuticals.
While engineering microorganisms can be challenging, recent technological advances, e.g. in multi-omics approaches, molecular biology, and genetic tools, employed in the context of multidisciplinary research approaches, can provide exciting opportunities to develop new microbial production platforms and explore novel metabolic reactions, pathways, regulatory mechanisms, bioproducts, and favorable production conditions.
BMC Biotechnology is pleased to present the collection titled ‘Increasing microbial efficiency’. This collection aligns with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure and acknowledges the importance of understanding the microbial cell working principles to foster sustainable, innovative, and resource-use effective technologies and industrial processes. The collection comprises research articles and methods in microbial biotechnology with a specific focus on technologies, applications, and methodologies that can be used to reveal and reprogram biological functions for potential biotechnological applications and enhance microbial efficiency. We highlight contributions addressing a broad range of research areas including, but not limited to:
- Modulation of microbial mechanisms to enhance metabolic and bioenergetic efficiency
- Enhancing microbial efficiency to produce primary and secondary metabolites, pharmaceuticals, biomaterials, biopolymers, biosurfactants, and bioemulsifiers
- Engineering of microbial metabolic pathways to enhance the production of biomass and/or valuable bio-compounds
- Optimizing microbial carbon use efficiency
- Advances in genetic engineering and molecular genetic tools to exploit and optimize microbial metabolism and bioenergetics
- Multi-omics technologies applied to use and optimize microbial metabolism and bioenergetics
- Bioprocess optimization and bioreactor design to increase microbial production of biomass and valuable compounds
- Approaches to enhance microbial stress tolerance and resilience
- Microbial cell factories: designing and building microbial cell factories for the production of valuable bioactive compounds
- Microbiota and probiotic microorganisms: exploring the microbial diversity to exploit beneficial microorganisms and metabolic traits to sustainably produce biofuels, bio-compounds, metabolites and pharmaceuticals
- Microbial fermentation processes
- Microbial systems and synthetic biology to enhance microbial efficiency
- Microbial bioremediation: developing approaches to remove contaminants from the environment
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